An Unusual Assignment
by miladyFeather
Summary: A private is sent to spy on Mustang's command from Central, but someone really should have told him what he was getting himself into. This insanity was *not* what he signed on for. For FMA Day 2015.


**A/N: Happy FMA Day! We wrote this oneshot for the occasion. For the record, yes, Private Brewster is an OC, but it will become clear very quickly that he is not the main character. And, just in case there was any confusion, neither of us is Hiromu Arakawa and therefore no-one involved in this owns FMA.**

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 **An Unusual Assignment**

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Private Brewster wasn't that happy to be out in the boondocks—East _City_ , that is, if you could even call it a city—but he would have been a lot happier to be there if he had any idea why he'd been sent to the place to begin with.

Well, okay, he knew why he was there. He had orders. He just had no idea what the heck the orders meant. _"Watch Colonel Mustang and the men under his command, and report back any odd behavior,_ " that's what the orders said. No explanation.

Not even _suspicious_ behavior. Just... odd behavior. But the orders came directly from command, his CO had suggested that the Fuhrer might've been involved somehow... he had no idea what was going on but once he had the rank to demand one, he was _getting_ an explanation.

In the meantime, though, he was skulking around Eastern HQ, and becoming increasingly convinced that if the Fuhrer wanted to know about the "odd" behavior under Mustang's command, he was going to need to send a moving-picture crew or something. Brewster could only write so fast.

The door to Mustang's office hung open, a hairline crack spreading out from the chalky imprint of boot treads.

"THE H*** MUSTANG?" roared an exceptionally short blonde in a garish red coat. "That wasn't a Stone, it was a worker uprising at a garnet mine with _one working alchemist_. Stop giving us s*** leads."

"Brother, you can't just barge in like that!" protested the large suit of armor that always seemed to follow in the blonde's wake. "I'm sorry, sir—"

"It's quite alright, Alphonse," Mustang said calmly, leaning back in his chair, a teasing smirk on his lips. "It's hardly _your_ fault that Fullmetal has yet to learn how to politely knock on a door."

"Well maybe if you figured out how to tell a story about some dude scratching arrays on semi-precious gems and actual alchemical amplifiers, I'd bother learning!" Fullmetal snapped.

 _How come the one that's not in armor's called Fullmetal?_ Brewster wondered absently.

"If you keep yelling like that, you'll disturb the rest of Headquarters," Hawkeye, Mustang's second-in-command, said calmly.

"Aw, come on, Hawkeye, let the kid blow off some steam," Havoc drawled out. The second lieutenant had shoved his paperwork to the corner of his desk, clearly more engaged in watching the argument than in his actual work.

"And let us blow off some paperwork," Breda muttered, almost too softly to be heard—but Hawkeye apparently did, because she turned to glare at him almost immediately.

 _Does "seems to be run like a kindergarten class" count as odd?_ Brewster wondered.

"I'll stop yelling if Mustang agrees to give us better leads," Fullmetal said, crossing his arms and scowling. He looked kind of scary for someone so tiny.

Mustang crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. "And where do you think I'm hiding these 'better leads'?" he asked. "It's not as though the leads you're looking for are easy to come across, Fullmetal. You should be thanking me for giving you as many as I have."

Fullmetal scowled. "If you keep screwing up something like this, how are you ever going to become—"

"That's enough, Ed," Hawkeye interrupted.

 _Become what?_ Brewster wondered. _Is Mustang up for promotion? Is_ that _what this is about?_

He thought about the chaos he'd been watching for the last few hours, and two days before that—and decided, no, that wasn't very likely. Unless the higher-ups were _much_ more out of touch than he'd been told.

"Honestly, kid, _would_ it kill you to thank the Colonel once in a while?" Breda asked.

"Are you asking because you want him to thank Mustang or because you think it would be funny to watch him try to force out the words?" Falman asked, without a hint of inflection.

"Definitely the second one," Havoc said with a poorly hidden snicker.

"Aw, come on guys," Fuery put in, finally looking up from the disassembled radio he was tinkering with. "Give Ed a break. Do you really _have_ to tease him every time he comes into the office?"

"Goin' to the theatre costs money," Breda said, smirking.

"I am not here for your entertainment, I'm here to—" Fullmetal all but snarled.

"Well then, what _are_ you here for, Fullmetal?" Mustang asked. "You don't seem to have a report ready for me."

"Why bother giving you a report when nothing that mattered happened?" Fullmetal asked. "I mean, yeah, we _kinda_ got involved in the worker uprising but we didn't do anything other than transmute some crap that the mine bosses blew up later anyhow." He shrugged. "I didn't really think it was enough to report."

"Oh really?" Mustang asked. "So I should just ignore the repeated phone calls from the head of the mining company complaining that some 'State-sanctioned hooligan' started transmuting giant rock walls so close to certain mineshafts that they began to collapse, costing the company thousands of cens to replace their damaged equipment?"

"The only reason they collapsed is because they weren't safe for people to work in the first place!" Fullmetal snapped. "The owners kept saying they'd been inspected but we figured out pretty quick that the inspectors were in their pockets. That mining company should be thanking me; those reports should've been warning number 800 that the bozos they had in that town were corrupt!"

"Hey Boss," Havoc piped up. "How'd you get involved with the miners anyway? I thought you were supposed to be talking to that alchemist?"

"They'd give him garnet from the mines that their bosses said they had to throw out, and he was giving them pieces of it with arrays carved into 'em in return," Fullmetal said. "They were basically bombs. Turns out there's a reason that guy isn't a _State_ Alchemist; he really hates the government, and businesses, and pretty much anyone who wears suits. He was ready to dislike Al because of the armor, even! Jerk." He muttered the last bit.

 _Where do they turn up these people?_ Brewster wondered.

"He wasn't _that_ bad, Brother," Alphonse protested weakly. "I mean, yeah, he was kinda angry at the government, and _really_ mad at the people in _charge_ of the mine, but he made sure everybody that worked there got out before that mineshaft actually started to collapse!"

"And you didn't see the need to write a report about this?" Hawkeye asked, quirking an eyebrow.

"Well, I mean, it wasn't our _fault_ this time!" Fullmetal started. He quickly backpedaled. "Not that it ever is, of course, but sometimes you could argue that we kind of made it worse and this time—no. It was already out of control and all we did was make sure that it didn't get worse."

"By collapsing mine shafts?" Falman asked.

"Yeah—well, I mean—if you say it like that, of course it sounds bad!" Fullmetal complained.

 _Is there a way for this to sound good?_ Brewster wondered. _And, again, how am I supposed to watch for odd things when they don't stop happening? Do I wait for things to be normal and report on the sheer unusualness of that?_

"So, care to explain how collapsing the mine shafts made this situation _better_?" Mustang asked.

Havoc leaned over to Breda, grinning wickedly. "This should be good," he pretended to whisper, too loud to be anything less than intentionally provocative.

"Well, the mine shafts were gonna collapse anyway, but at the rate things were going, they were going to collapse with people in them, so we thought... why not make sure they collapsed when they were empty?" Fullmetal said. "So it was a little impulsive. We kept people from getting hurt."

"But didn't care to see if the equipment could be moved out safely," Mustang added disapprovingly. "Do you even _realize_ how much it's going to cost the military to replace the equipment you damaged, Fullmetal? If you did it _on purpose_ , their claims against you are _valid_ , and I can't just let you off the hook."

"Can you prove the inspectors lied on their safety inspection reports?" Fuery suggested.

" _I_ can't, but the miners are putting together a court case, I think," Fullmetal said. "Me, Al, and a few of the less crazy miners talked down the lynch mob, but I don't think there's a single person in that town that wants those guys outside of a jail cell ever again, so... they've probably got records."

"That's a start," Hawkeye said, practically.

Mustang sighed. "I suppose I can fight off their complaints until the miners' case goes through," he said before abruptly glaring at the young man across his desk. " _Don't_ do this again, Fullmetal. And the next time you do, _call me first_. Making excuses for you goes a lot better when I know what's actually going on."

Fullmetal sighed gustily. "Fine."

"No backtalk this time," Falman observed.

"Shut up!" Fullmetal snapped, rounding on him.

"And there's the famous Elric temper," Breda said. "Well, I can't call it that, because it's only _Ed_ who acts like a tiny demon. Al's nicer than some of my cousins."

Without a shred of warning, Fullmetal exploded. "WHO THE H*** ARE YOU CALLING SHORTER THAN HIS OWN TEMPER—wait, no, that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it, Al? Anyhow, who're you calling... not tall?"

"Not really, Brother," Alphonse admitted.

"My gosh," Havoc breathed out. "He actually stopped himself from screaming for ten minutes straight. Al, are you _sure_ that's your brother? He isn't an alien or a freaky alchemy-created clone or something?"

"No, that's Brother all right," Alphonse said, sounding rather amused.

"This isn't funny, I'm a _perfect_ height for my age, leave me alone," Fullmetal huffed.

 _...Is there an in-joke I'm missing here?_ Brewster wondered. _Why doesn't anyone think it's odd that he just started screaming about his height?_

"Oh really?" Mustang drawled out. "Because I seem to recall you being that same height _two years ago_. Your _mechanic_ is taller than you."

"YOU LEAVE WINRY OUT OF THIS, SHE'S CLEARLY A FREAK!" Fullmetal snapped.

"Brother! Winry is _not_ a freak! How could you _say_ something like that?" Alphonse demanded.

"She's too tall and spends all her time working on machines and every time we go back to Resembool, she looks at my leg like she's gonna take it apart," Fullmetal shuddered. "She's an automail geek and it's affected her height somehow; I'm sure that's it. It's the only explanation."

 _Until the part about automail, I was very concerned about the direction this was going in,_ Brewster thought. _Then again, that's still a little odd... and I don't remember whether anyone mentioned Fullmetal having automail to me before._

The other adults, with the exception of Hawkeye, struggled to hide snickers, some more successfully than others.

"Yeah, that's _clearly_ the only explanation, Boss," Havoc said, practically choking in the effort not to burst out laughing.

 _And now I'm watching an office full of military professionals mock a kid with the equivalent rank of a major for an adolescent crush, unless I've suddenly lost my ability to read people_ , Brewster thought. _That's it. I'm done. I'm going to write all of this down, send it to Central, and hope that they call_ me _back after they get it._

 _But before that, I'm finding a bar. They have to have them in East, and there's at least a chance that they'll make more sense than Headquarters_.

If anyone in Mustang's office noticed a dark-haired man all but stalking past their office on his way out of Eastern HQ, they certainly didn't show it.

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End file.
